Background server calls insanity

Mobile Tech Phones & Tablets
1

Hi dear community, I’m here to report the weirdest “tech discovery” I possibly ever done.
I have a Raspberry Pi setup with PiHole to block all the ads and background server calling my devices do usually, especially my phone since it’s not rooted and I can’t block them natively on it.
Over time I’ve been noticing that the battery performance on my phone was really poor so I started uninstalling some of the few apps I installed that could lead to battery draining, started disabling things like background wifi scanning, auto brightness (which is really aggressive on Pie) and mail syncing. Nothing, nothing worked still getting almost half the time I used to get. I even thought that my charger has maybe gave up (not using the fast charger regularly to not obliterate the battery).
I did one thing that I didn’t know it could make a difference: disabled routing my wifi phone connection through PiHole. The battery drain is gone, the phone it’s not losing battery percentage in the background for no reason.

After all this my conclusion is that there’s something on my phone that’s phoning home constantly and if it’s not allowed to do that just keeps trying until it thrashes my phone’s battery. THIS IS INSANITY, I can’t protect my privacy in a reasonable manner else I’ll need to charge my one year old phone once every 24h being 100% of the time on amazing coverage wifi.

mobile.pipe.aria.microsoft.com and app-measurement.com are the culprit to me here. PiHole is blocking al lot of those requests from my phone. I’d like your help to figure this out, if my conclusions make any sense. Thanks for reading.

P.S. I didn’t know how to tile this post, feel free to let me know how to make it more clear for everybody else.

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I need to obliterate this thing, look at it!

3 Likes
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Root your phone to nuke bloatware and get more control?

1 Like
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I can’t since the device is still under warranty. It being a Moto X4 it’s not covered by warranty anymore if I load modified software. Also rooting it would pose all sorts of other problems like having to work around many apps blocking rooted phones for many different raesons (being cheating in games or security).
I don’t know where those connections may come from since I have Outlook preinstalled but I didn’t use it ever since booting the phone for the first time. I don’t know what else it could be since there were only Outlook and Linkedin preinstalled on that phone (other than the Moto app which doesen’t pose any threat to battery life).

4

Try disabling/uninstalling Outlook